Limited Government Is

Tag Archives: Medicare

In his latest display of his full USA federal government dictatorship over both the American people and the former co-branches of government, Dictator Obama is warning the Supreme Court to either rule in his favor or face severe consequences.

The per person Medicare insurance premium will increase from the present monthly fee of $96.40, Rising to: $104.20 in 2012; $120.20 in 2013; And $247.00 in 2014.
These are provisions incorporated in the Obamacare legislation, purposely delayed so as not To ‘confuse’ the 2012 re-election campaigns.
Tell all seniors that you know, so they will know who’s throwing them under the bus.
Let’s not forget the half trillion dollars taken out of medicare over the next ten years to finance Obamacare.

The good news for Barack Obama: the Associated Press reports today that Obama’s deficit commission wants to keep most of ObamaCare in place. The bad news: they pronounce it unsustainable – unless it includes hard caps on c0verage and decisions made to stop care. Doesn’t this sound a little familiar?

For the first time, the government would set – and enforce – an overall budget for Medicare, Medicaid and other federal programs that cover more than 100 million people, from Alzheimer’s patients in nursing homes to premature babies in hospital intensive care.

Palin attracted wide attention by denouncing nonexistent “death panels” in Obama’s overhaul, but a fixed budget as the commissioners propose could lead to denial of payment for medical care in some circumstances.

Overall, the nation will spend about $2.6 trillion this year on health care, and there’s evidence that a significant share of that is for procedures and tests that are of little benefit to patients. There seems to be room enough to cut, but no consensus on what should go.

Six months ago, President Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rammed Obamacare down the throats of an unwilling American public. Half a year removed from the unprecedented legislative chicanery and backroom dealing that characterized the bill’s passage, we know much more about the bill than we did then. A few of the revelations:

Most of these are not new, but if the White House is going to use the media spotlight on healthcare reform this week to repeat many of the same lies and half-truths, then it is incumbent on someone to point them out once again.

8. Small business taxes will not go up to pay for the cost of the uninsured. It depends on what the definition of a small business is. The President’s proposal defines this as any business with less than 50 employees. Any business with 51 or more employees which does not provide insurance will be required to pay a fee of $2,000 per worker if any of their employees receive subsidized coverage in the government insurance exchange (although the President’s proposal does except the first 20 employees from this calculation). In addition, any small business owner who earns more than $200,000 per year will be required to pay an additional .9% in payroll taxes for Medicare, and a brand new 2.9% tax on unearned income (interest, dividends, etc.).

6. You will be able to keep your doctor if you are on Medicare. Only if your doctor does not opt out of participating in Medicare as a result of health reform, a possibility the government is keenly aware of since the Center for Medicare Services continues to extend the 2010 deadline for physicians to opt out based on the uncertainty over the health reform legislation. The recent, albeit limited, Medicare/Medicaid opt-out by the Mayo Clinic is likely a harbinger of things to come.

3. Medicare benefits will not be cut. The CBO Director directly contradicted this claim while testifying before Congress back in September, a fact which even the White House seems to acknowledge by clarifying that only “guaranteed” Medicare benefits will not be cut. This hair-splitting by the White House will mean little to seniors who lose benefits they currently receive through Medicare Advantage plans.

2. If you like the insurance you have, keep it. Unless you have a Medicare Advantage plan (see #3). Or unless your employer drops your coverage (see #4). Or unless you have a high deductible plan paired with a Health Savings Account (HSA). And if the Democrats use reconciliation to revive the public option as threatened – which notably the President is not opposed to – then we are ultimately all moving to single payer.

1. The President’s proposal represents the “largest tax cut for health care in history”. This one IS new and it is my personal favorite. I suppose it’s true insomuch as no one else has ever had the gall to spin the creation of a $2+ trillion entitlement program as a “tax cut”. Personally I think the fact that the President proposes to provide tax-payer funded subsidies to families earning up to $88,000 the most fiscally irresponsible aspect of the entire plan. Coming a close second is the fact that over half of the cost of these “tax cuts” will be funded from reductions in Medicare spending, when Medicare itself faces insolvency within the next 10 years. If the White House wants to tout these subsidies – funded largely at the expense of seniors – as a “tax cut”…then I say go for it.

The welfare state and your life savings are two cars heading down a one-lane road in opposite directions. One must yield, or there will be a crash.

For Americans who believe in the old-fashioned virtues of hard work, self reliance and respect for private property, the solution is obvious. The welfare state must yield.

For politicians who believe in the welfare state and redistributing wealth, the solution is equally obvious. Your savings must yield.

Barack Obama is of the latter group. In the new health care proposal he outlined this week, he suggested a series of unprecedented tax increases that would extend the greedy hands of government into the life savings of hard-working Americans.

These new taxes would essentially construct a new fiscal pipeline capable of carrying money out of the savings of private citizens and dumping it into government coffers specifically for subsidizing Medicare under the new health care system Obama envisions. The White House summary of Obama’s proposal presents this would-be pipeline as a facilitator of economic justice.

“Under current law, workers who earn a salary pay a flat tax of 1.45 percent of their wages to support the Medicare Hospital Insurance (HI) trust fund, but those who have substantial unearned income do not, raising issues of fairness,” says the summary. “The Act will include an additional 0.9 percentage point Hospital Insurance tax for households with incomes exceeding $200,000 for singles and $250,000 for married couples filing jointly. In addition, it would add a 2.9 percent tax for such high-income households to unearned income including interest, dividends, annuities, royalties and rents (excluding income from active participation in S corporations).”

There are, of course, multiple unanswered questions here. For starters, wouldn’t increasing the Medicare payroll tax on “households with incomes exceeding $200,000 for singles and $250,000 for married couples filing jointly” violate Obama’s pledge that, as his campaign literature put it, he would “not raise any tax rate on families making less than $250,000 per year, period.” Plenty of single Americans, who are raising children or taking care of other dependents, file their taxes claiming “head of household” status. Aren’t they “families” covered by Obama’s tax pledge?

Secondly, wouldn’t slapping these households with a new 2.9 percent tax on interest, dividends, annuities, royalties and rents also violate Obama’s tax pledge?

But the most important question is this: Would allowing the government to tap into the savings of one group of Americans to pay entitlement benefits to another group create a system of taxation that could swiftly destroy the American dream?

Yes, it would. Here’s how:

When Obama took office, the federal government confronted a massive long-term fiscal problem. The nonpartisan Peter G. Peterson Foundation estimated that revenues expected under the current tax system would fall $56.4 trillion short of covering the current federal debt and the long-term costs of promised entitlement benefits. That $56.4 trillion equaled $184,000 for every living American and $435,000 for every full-time worker. Given the fiscal trajectory at the end of 2008, the government was headed toward spending 18 percent of gross domestic product by 2028 just to cover the annual costs of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and interest on the debt.

To put that in perspective, the entire federal government cost only 18.2 percent of GDP in 2001 and only 19.6 percent as late as 2007. By 2028, if overall government expenditures were held at the 2001 level as a share of GDP, welfare-state entitlements would squeeze out all other federal spending — including maintaining an Army and a Navy.

The Mack truck of the welfare state was speeding down the one-lane road straight at the little compact car of your life savings.

How did Obama respond? He massively ramped up short-term spending, submitting a budget that will spend an average of 24.13 percent of GDP over the next four years — more than the average of 19.13 percent FDR spent during the Depression and World War II. For the long run, Obama is trying to establish a national health care system in which the federal government will subsidize health insurance not only for the elderly and the poor but also for the middle-aged and the middle class.

Redistributionist politicians like Obama see their core constituents as the net recipients of government benefits, not the net payers. Increasing the number of net recipients serves their ideology and political interests.

The new taxes Obama wants to impose on interest, dividends, annuities and rents to pay for his health care plan are in fact taxes on the life savings of the net payers — on their 401(k)s, savings accounts, paid-off mortgages and life insurance policies — to cover benefits for the net recipients. The redistributionists would ultimately need $435,000 from every full-time worker to cover the welfare state’s unfunded liabilities — even if Obama’s health care plan were never enacted.